


Pleasure in Stillness

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: 15 Days of FatT 2018, F/F, Post-Miracle Mirage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 07:15:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13735860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: ⸢Signet⸣ pays a visit and takes a break.





	Pleasure in Stillness

**Author's Note:**

> Belatedly, prompt 4: vacation.

Here’s a sleek single-person ship, tucked into the corner of a hangar that makes it seem minute. A strange toy, traces of the densest part of the mirage still sliding from its hull. Its main access is open. Here: a long coat, elaborate in its embroidery and simple in its cut, folded and laid on the seat. Gold thread glitters. Beside it, a dark shoulder bag nearly blends into its shadowy surroundings. 

The hem of ⸢Signet⸣’s long dress slips from the rim of the access hatch with a gentle silken whisper. A small exhale. Ah—

Gray Gloaming is the only person present to note that the hatch leaves no trace of dirt on ⸢Signet⸣. 

”Thank you,” ⸢Signet⸣ says, glancing around. The corner of her mouth has an uneasy downward tilt. She’s otherwise immaculate. Not a dark circle. Not a hair out of place. 

Gray shrugs expressively—wheels backwards to give ⸢Signet⸣ a little extra space to arrange her bag, settle her clothes as she likes. 

“It was—we had a really good talk last time you were here. You’ve done a lot. Of course I’ll help out.”

“That’s not why I do what I do,” ⸢Signet⸣ says. She takes her bag and her coat—smiles at Gray. A hand against her elbow. 

How does it feel to be hundreds of years old?

How does it feel to lose—

“Come visit before you leave.” Gray takes her bag for her, gentle and definite. “Demani would like that too. She’s off-station with me right now, but we’ll be back by tomorrow.”

“Uh.”

“Oh,” Gray says. “Oh, sorry. I’m a Satellite. I can maintain a few frames at once. Even if sometimes things get distracting. I’m very good at compartmentalising.” A smile, sweet on her round face. 

 

The route that they move through the station by is a strange sort of maintenance passage, the way the station is cobbled together showing in the unevenness of material, although it’s been assembled with care. Still, it’s necessarily made of a certain amount of scrap around its highly styled Rapid Evening core—a mask, a shield.

⸢Signet⸣ has seen that core, but as far as almost anyone else knows, this is what there is.

They walk these shadowed ways—no shame to their destination, but a need, grown lately acute, for quiet. 

Here, a thin partition wall separates ⸢Signet⸣ and Gray from the rise and fall of a mass of voices, the bar closest to the docks rendered a sea of sound. Yes, ⸢Signet⸣ could decipher it, lift out this voice or that, consider them. Even on her brighter days—even on her darker days—she would not. So: let it be just that, a sea, always in motion and never understood—a proof that the universe goes on. 

Here, water grumbles its way through great pipes, some dry with heat and the surfaces of others misting with cool condensation. 

Here, a sudden glimpse out through an unexpected window—the mirage spreading in tendrils and swirls—

Gray turns and rests her hand against the window for a moment, looking—makes no comment, but turns away with a quick tilt of her frame at last—onward.

Here’s a door.

Anticipation has been unusual in ⸢Signet⸣ of late, but there’s no other word for the thing that has been slowly uncurling itself in her, stretching, testing the ways she might allow herself to feel—shortly. 

“Eloise is good,” Gray says. “Just tell her what you like. But of course you can just spend a little time with everyone in the main rooms too if you prefer that.”

Under ⸢Signet⸣’s hand this side of the door is cool, the surface a little uneven—a little tougher against her index finger than against her thumb. 

She draws a long slow breath—allows her eyes to flutter closed. 

“Have a good time, Excerpt,” Gray says, with a real warmth. “You do deserve it.”

⸢Signet⸣ pushes the door open, and steps into the back room of the club that Gray has insisted she can use to avoid—well—the sort of obligation she ordinarily seeks out. 

Cool dimness. The faint scent of citrus and tea. And a door left ajar for her, light spilling in.

 

And yes—here’s a black bag forgotten on a wide perfectly-made bed, and a coat folded beside it—but the dress draped over them is left carelessly, a spill of colour, shifting as the mirage outside. Two delicate shoes tumble over themselves by the door. Hair pins cling together on a dressing table.

“Oh,” ⸢Signet⸣ says. “Oh, oh, oh—“

She isn’t naked—keeps the long shift that she wore under her dress, bunched up around her hips as it is where she sits in the chair she was firmly directed to. Her hair moves softly against the satin fabric of it as she shifts, restless—hips tilting—and that makes her gasp, the toy that’s pressed just slightly into her entrance slipping for a moment deeper.

“Still,” Eloise says—strokes a fine-boned hand over ⸢Signet⸣’s head, lifts away stray strands of hair from her forehead—rubs a thumb across her cheek—an encouraging little gesture, tilting ⸢Signet⸣’s head back so that ⸢Signet⸣ is looking up at her. “Would you like a break?”

“No,” ⸢Signet⸣ says, because she can still answer that question without having to swim through the fog of her mind to find the word, so it can’t be time yet.

Violence has never been for her, not in this. But pleasure—how much she’s wanted it—how hard it can be to allow it. 

How sweet, to be allowed to pretend one has no choice. 

Fingers in her mouth until she sucks on them—wet fingers sliding under the neck of her shift, dragging across her breasts—

She lets out a shivering sigh. She hardly dares draw another breath. She hardly dares move a muscle, but she can’t find the tension to hold them either. 

“There you go,” Eloise says—and with a hand on ⸢Signet⸣’s hip tilts her body so that she is suddenly filled, all at once—so that she falls forward with her cheek to Eloise’s stomach—her hands clutching at Eloise’s shirt—mouth open on a soundless attempt at a cry.

Eloise touches her hair again, and she can’t keep her eyes open at that gesture—not a chance—not when it makes heat blossom low in her stomach like nothing else. Such a comfort that is becomes the other thing, the burning one that needs and needs and needs—

“Fuck yourself a little,” Eloise says with that gentle voice of hers. “Here, stay here against me. Don’t worry about anything. Just feel it—“

 

And here, a hazy night later: a plate of sliced fruit on a low table, the colours vibrant, sharp. The room is light and airy, as though the breeze might be blowing in from the sea through tall patio doors—as though gauzy curtains we lifted by it—as though the morning sun wavered through them, not obscured but diffused, transmuted from blinding to illuminating. Tea and coffee in bone china. Flowers are a dash of red and orange and white, here in a vase, there in a wild beautiful tangle.

⸢Signet⸣ sits cross-legged on a floor which is more comfortable than it ought to be, surrounded by this dream of a world, and others sit with her—speak in quiet voices of the things that one can do with hands and mind—art and pleasure, the act of creation. One need not name the other things that hands can do here. Not just now. Not for this little while. There is only ⸢Signet⸣ and her pleasant company and the morning—only Eloise’s easy smile and the dream of roses and the lax feeling of a body whose tension has been systematically stripped from it, act by act—and time, time—

Time, that in the way of this new Mirage, slips—

Twists—

Unspools.


End file.
